Administration

Nicholas Allen, Director

Franklin Professor of English

Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center and Franklin Professor of English at UGA. He has published several books on Ireland and its literature, has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College, and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Irish Research Council.

Lloyd Winstead, Senior Associate Director

Lloyd Winstead’s background is in higher education administration. He oversees general operations of the Willson Center including programs, research clusters, public partners and internal grants.His research interests include the history of higher education and student life. He is author of When Colleges Sang: The Story of Singing in American College Life (2013, University of Alabama Press), recipient of the 2014 Georgia Author of the Year Award in history from the Georgia Writers Association. He holds a doctorate from the University of Georgia Institute of Higher Education.

Nell Andrew, Associate Academic Director

Associate Professor and area chair, Art History, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Nell Andrew teaches courses in Modern Art, the historical avant-garde, dance history, and early film. Andrew also co-directs, with Susan Rosenbaum, the Interdisciplinary Modernism(s) Workshop, a faculty research cluster sponsored by the Willson Center and the Office of Research. Currently, she is completing a book on the intersection of avant-garde dance and the development of abstract painting in late-19th and early-20th-century Europe, including studies of dancemakers Loie Fuller, Valentine de Saint-Point, Mary Wigman, Sophie Taeuber, Oskar Schlemmer and Akarova. She has previously worked for the curatorial departments of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and the Art Institute of Chicago, and has contributed criticism to contemporary art exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago and the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati.

Stephen Berry, Associate Academic Director for Digital Humanities

Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era, Department of History

Stephen Berry feels compelled to study “old, unhappy, far-off things.” His research explores the intersections of race, class, gender, family, depression, disappointment, and death in the nineteenth-century South. He is the author or editor of four books on America in the mid-19th century, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War, the Book of the Month Club main selection for March 2008, and Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges. He oversees the web project “CSI Dixie,” devoted to the coroner’s office in the nineteenth century South. Berry is Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Historical Association; co-director, with Claudio Saunt, of the Center for Virtual History; and co-editor, with Amy Murrell Taylor, of the UnCivil Wars series at the University of Georgia Press. A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Berry’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others.

Barbara McCaskill, Associate Academic Director

Barbara McCaskill earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University. She held a General Sandy Beaver Teaching Professorship (2005-08), and is a recent recipient of the Martha Munn Bedingfield Excellence in Teaching Award from the Department of English (2014). She has taught courses in African American and Multicultural American Literature at UGA for 23 years. In 2012 McCaskill was named the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Society and Culture at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her fourth scholarly book is the single-authored study Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory, published by the University of Georgia Press in May 2015. She is co-director of the Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative, initially funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Isabelle Wallace, Associate Academic Director for Arts and a2ru

Associate Professor of Art History, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Isabelle Loring Wallace’s research focuses on a wide range of objects and images, ranging from mid-twentieth-century American painting to early twenty-first-century photography, video, and installation. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays, and the co-editor of Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, with Jennifer Hirsh (Ashgate 2011) and Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility, with Nora Wendl (Ashgate 2013). Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon, 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis. Simultaneously, she is working on a new project that considers recurring intersections between new media art and assorted Judeo-Christian themes. At the Dodd, she teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on postwar visual culture, as well as the art history area’s required seminar on historiography and methods.

J. Derrick Lemons, Religion Fellow

J. Derrick Lemons is an Assistant Professor of Religion. He graduated from Southern Wesleyan University with a Bachelor of Science in Religion (1994) and from Asbury Theological Seminary with a Master’s (1997) and Doctorate (2008). His research and teaching are guided by his interest in the intentional innovations of religious subcultures and the influence of theology on Christians across time and space. He conducts ethnographic research about the influence of Leslie Newbigin on the Missional church movement within evangelical denominations in America. He also investigates the theological, social, and religious-community orientations of millennials in the Southeastern United States. Currently, he serves as the PI of a $217,000 John Templeton Foundation grant that has gathered anthropologists and theologians to develop an anthropologically-informed, reflexive, theological framework to aid research in the anthropology of Christianity. He is the Director of the Center for Theologically Engaged Anthropology, a Willson Center Fellow of Religion at UGA, and the Vice President Elect of the American Academy of Religion for the Southeastern Region.

Éric Marty, Digital Arts Fellow

Éric Marty is composer and media artist who works in sound, interactive design and hybrid forms. He also conducts research in data visualization with ECOGIG (Ecosystem Impacts of Oil and Gas Inputs to the Gulf) in UGA’s Department of Marine Sciences. His artistic honors include the Canada Council for the Arts’ Stauffer Prize, the ALEA III International Composition Prize, composition prizes from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ASCAP and SOCAN, and fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and the Fondation Camargo near Marseilles. His installations and site-specific performances, supported by the Canada Council, have been exhibited at the ISCM World Music Days, the Ojai Music Festival, the International Digital Media and Arts Association, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Flux Night Atlanta and the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Marty studied at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California at Berkeley, and holds a PhD in Composition and Computer Music. As Willson Center Digital Arts Fellow, Marty helps build interdisciplinary collaborations among the arts and sciences at UGA.

Scott Nesbit, Digital Humanities Fellow

Scott Nesbit is an assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Environment and Design. His work explores the intersection between digital tools and humanistic questions, particularly questions touching on the history and spaces of the American South. He earned a PhD in history at the University of Virginia in 2013, where he wrote about the geography of slavery and emancipation in the Civil War South. From 2009 until 2014 he was the associate director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. He has led digital history projects such as Visualizing Emancipation, which used a wide array of textual sources – ranging from military correspondence to runaway slave advertisements found in southern newspapers – to map out where and when slavery fell apart during the American Civil War.

Winnie Smith, Program Coordinator

Winnie received her BFA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing, as well as her MAED in Museum Education, from UGA. She teaches an OLLI@UGA class on illustrating picture books and an after school art program for K-2 students. She has been an employee at UGA since 2007. Her interests include crafts, art history, children’s picture books, and band show posters.

Dave Marr, Communications Director

Dave Marr is a University of Georgia graduate in Film Studies and Journalism. A writer and musician who has lived in Athens since 1991, he was city editor and film columnist at Flagpole magazine prior to joining the Willson Center in 2012.